


De Immortalis

by blood_and_gore



Series: Originals [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Changelings, Demons, Fae & Fairies, Gen, Horror, Immortality, Near Death Experiences, POV Second Person, Psychological Horror, Surreal, Unreliable Narrator, found family? not exactly, nosleep, originally posted on reddit, reddit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 04:25:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18461438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blood_and_gore/pseuds/blood_and_gore
Summary: TW: suicide, suicide attempts, transphobia, abusive relationships, attempted murder, emetophobia, death





	1. pt. i: J's story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: suicide, suicide attempts, transphobia, abusive relationships, attempted murder, emetophobia, death

 

 

It starts when you're born a month early. Heart malformed, underweight, but alive.

When you're a year old, the plane crashes. It's okay, though- you'd missed the flight.

You vaguely recall falling into the water on a crowded beach while on vacation in Florida. You  _think_  you remember your dad fishing you out with water in your lungs and salt in your eyes.

Kids can be cruel. They push you into a lake in the winter for your birthday, but you crawl out as soon as they're gone and you're back in class the next morning. Everything's fine.

You loved the boy. You loved him, (and you love him so much and you know it's forever even though you're just kids. You love him when he hits you and you love him when you hit him and you love him even when he puts his hands around your neck and squeezes. You love him) so much you refuse to die.

You've made attempts before, of course, but they take this one seriously. You speak in tongues and shriek shriek shriek horrible things, you hallucinate, you puke on an EMT, and it's all for nothing. Nine minutes is the longest you get in a dream of a waiting room with white walls and no windows. Your own goddamn personalized pre-afterlife.

You wake from the coma after three days, Jesus H. Fucking Christ, the week before Easter. A boy in the hospital says awful things and you deal and then he finally says something awful to the friend you've just made, and then everything's a blur of red. Bruises, breaks, and a lack of death for him or you and they change your meds again. Everything from there on out is a blur of white.

You've developed a fascination with triangles. Crows follow you everywhere, and you feed them. They bring death. Your friend from the looney bin kills herself while you're playing Rachmaninoff with a ghost in the basement of band camp, and now another friend's name is a fucking hashtag, and you try to follow them but you can't and there's yet another a blur of hospitals. It falls apart and comes back together, and then it's okay again for a while.

Time passes, and you didn't believe things would actually get better but now they seem to be. Work. An apartment in the city. You think your roommates are nice, until you hear them gossiping about you, the tranny freak they have to live with. Time passes. You try to hang yourself again and the rope breaks. (The rope breaks  _every fucking time_.)

You're good at math. It isn't very hard to figure out that the force from the car crash should have killed you. But you're not dead, you're making the usual bad decisions and hating yourself because you know now that you cannot die.

 _You're like me,_  says the man on the train. You snap the best insult-threat combination you can think of at the moment but he keeps talking and when you look, your eyes slide right past because he's  _gray_  and it's like he's made of fog.  _We are the same,_  he says, and he leads you through town in fog and mist and you get into fights with people twice your size and he tells you all about how immortality works, and you have a new friend who tells you the mindfog's not your fault. No devil-deals were made; you're abnormal and unnatural, but not bad. Not evil.

_Changeling._

After all, death isn't really possible when you've never felt alive.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> originally posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/9d4yko/de_immortalis/


	2. chapter ii: L's story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: implied/referenced gun violence

You find out by complete accident when the mean boy in English class tries to shoot up the place.

You try your best to hide the way the class has practiced it in the drills, but it's all so very fast and before you can do anything there's at least three different types of pain.

When you wake up in the hospital, they say things like  _medical miracle_  and  _lucky_  and  _i'm so sorry about your friends, but you'll be here for at least another week_  and  _four of the funerals have already passed_  and after the first five condolences you just tune it out. You were the weird kid, after all. You weren't friends with any of them anyway.

Maybe it was the fact that your single mother was always absent (though now she watches you like a hawk and acts as if the slightest bit of physical activity will ruin your brand new heart.) Maybe it was because of the anxiety, or the fact that you were gay.

The brand new organs in your body do their job, and you're back soon enough. Your mother worries, people try to give you hugs, and even though you get panic attacks just thinking about it you decide to write down the experience in your college application essay.

And you know it'll pay off, of course, because your grades are high and your essays were worded to appeal to their compassion. You're wondering if it made anyone cry when the bomb hits and you become the survivor again, and you're a medical miracle. A nurse who you saw after the shooting jokes that God won't let you die, and that's when you figure it out for sure. You don't include the whole immortality thing when you write it down- but you do, y'know, write it. Waste not, want not.  _Ambition shouldn't be a source of shame._

You're contacted for a scholarship for someplace elite, and you wear a black suit jacket and new tie. The man you're there to meet wears gray, but it's somehow difficult to decipher what he looks like beyond that. It's like he's surrounded in fog, all blurry and indistinct. Actually, no, that's wrong. It's as if he's  _made_  of fog. Strange.

After the obligatory pleasantries, he tells you something that would make your heart stop if you didn't know by now that it probably never would.  _You're like me_  he says.

You're not quite sure how to respond to that, though a paranoid section of the back of your mind screams that he knows about your secret, about the extent of your injuries, how you felt yourself die and had to sit in a blank white waiting room before they brought you back. How bullies' weapons would never hit you. How you got pnemonia when you were little and didn't die. But it's just paranoia, right? And then he goes and says  _i can't die either. We are the same._

And as if in a dream, you listen to him speak. A distant, smarter part of you knows that this isn't possible, that you should probably just go home now. But you listen, and ask if what you are is similar to the myths you've read.  _Yes,_  he says. He tells you that whenever you come near death, it will take others in your stead. He tells you that it's not your fault, though you are the one to blame.

He tells you all about how immortality works, and that you have both a mentor and friend in him now. You bring destruction wherever you go, but you aren't evil.  _Changeling._  You aren't cursed; you're a gift from the Fae.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/9ds900/de_immortalis_pt_ii_l/


	3. pt. iii: M's story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This narrator is probably my favorite one. I can't even imagine what   
> i'd be like if i became immortal during my scene/emo/goth years.

Immortality is weird, right? Like, you can make it look like you're older or younger than you actually are now, but if you lose focus you'll go back to looking like a teenage girl with 2011 scene hair, but somehow all gray. Like fog, mist, whatever. Same thing.

When you first met the guy you thought he was messing with you, just one of those freaks you see every day in the city, until he literally told you what you were thinking. Mind reading and all that. Clear-seeing. Whatever, let's be real- it did take some convincing.

Some weird "psychic" had done the same thing when you were eleven, saying you were a fairy or something like that. The gray man said "Fae" and when you Googled it, it did sound pretty similar. And, well, what he said about death following me made sense- you got hit by a car the as soon as you walked from the building.

For a long time you'd wondered if maybe the fake-psychic cursed you, or something. But  _whatever_. You try not to think about that day, because the memory is all gray and misty. Your first near-death experience. He said there weren't any other immortals alive right now (sounds fake, but okay,) but people tended to start dying sooner in life. You'd snapped at him, said you were way too young to even think about dying.

That memory's blurry too. Kinda purple, maybe. How do memories have color, anyway? You don't have synesthesia or any of those weird "aura" thingies. Not like the fake-psychic.  _Bitch._ Whatever. You need to take a nap. No more thinking.

It's fucking  _weird._  You still need to sleep and eat and all that. You're in college now, even though the gray man says that if you wanted to you could disappear. No way are you missing the parties- you can metabolize alcohol like anyone else your age. (Well, depending on the definition of "age" you're going for. Still, you do what students do- you pretend you can dance. You pretend you can sing.)

That bit, the social aspect- it's difficult. There's a sort of disconnect. Though you try not to dwell on it, your mind returns every so often to the fact that you won't die. The gray man said there are only a few very specific conditions under which you can, as he said, "shed your mortal coil." He always talks so strangely. And in so many things, though not this subject, you can't help but feel he's lying.

The gray man says it'll get easier eventually, the disconnect. The fact that you now know words like  _disconnect_  and  _metabolize_  even though you didn't know those words at fourteen. The fact that you don't fit any scientific explanation, even though sometimes you just refuse to believe that you were somehow switched at birth with a supernatural cryptid-y thing.

But hey, that's life. You're starting to get that, in between parties and classes on genetics. And life can be figured out. You just  _know_  it can. You know that it's hella improbable that you're the only one- there's got to be another immortal other than the gray man and the dead ones he refuses to tell you about.  _Changeling._

You know that there's more. You aren't an idiot. You know your DNA isn't human, so he could be telling the truth about you being somehow Fae or whatever. He also says you're blessed, but logically you know that can't be true. Maybe you're not cursed either, though you're not sure. One of the things you do know for certain is that there's something the gray man isn't saying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/9jvzs1/de_immortalis_pt_iii_m/


	4. pt. iv: S's story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: drowning, unhealthy power balances within a relationship, implied relationship abuse

You died in the water, cold and afraid. Well, you actually weren't afraid by the time you were dead- you hadn't been able to truly feel anything, not even fear, for hours by the time it all ended and you were gone.

Gone, gone, gone forever. You were gone and then you weren't; still cold, still drenched, still hurting from the spot you'd skinned your knee on the deck. Still bone-tired, but not gone anymore- your heart was beating, your lungs breathed, your mind worried. Your lips had turned blue from the cold of the water. Everything ached, paddling towards the lifeboats that carried people who thought this was all an adventure, who had coats, who probably knew how to really swim rather than flail about in the water. (Thouch they tried to get the women and children off first, plenty of men found their way onto the lifeboats. Plenty of women and children were missed, including you, left for the waves to string them along.)

And then you were ashore, and then time passed and you had nowhere to go. No home, no job, and you barely spoke English so obtaining either of those was nearly impossible in a time where no one wanted to teach a foreign woman with no skills and no money. You were lost again, only on land rather than water. So, of course, it makes sense that you were drawn back to the sea where it'd all began, with the need to return to lifelessness (and lifelessness is a room with white walls and a white floor, empty and smelling like stone,) pulling at your soul like... like an anchor. You followed that mental anchor with the screams still echoing in your head like a demented song.

And, of course, you didn't die. The gray man says that none of your kind can. ( _Our kind,_  he says, as if you have something in common. You don't want to have anything in common with him. He smells like rot not quite masked by expensive cologne, cologne like that worn by the dead men from the Titanic who watched each other drown. You smell like the ocean these days, cold and dead. The smell is nauseating and all too strong.)

He says that you will live forever except under very specific conditions. He savors those words like wine, and when you ask what those conditions are he swallows them up and refuses to tell them. It's been nearly a century and you haven't aged since the Titanic and you  _hate_  the movie and you hatehatehate the gray man but you don't leave because there's nowhere else to go, and you're not blessed. You know you're not cursed, that it's just in your blood ( _genetics_ , they say nowadays) but you might as well be. Nothing's right. Even the word  _Fae_  seems too lovely, too sweet to describe what you are- the modern vampires fit more, honestly. Sometimes you watch that absurd movie and think back to when some part of your psyche knowing that after this nothing would be right again, that things from here on out would be irrevocably  _wrong_.

You used to pray to meet Death. But if your hunch is right, you already have. You live with him. He's gray and cold and his smiles are warm and decieving. (That's how fairies are, you suppose. That's how  _you_  are.) Sometimes you watch as he meets the newest Fae. Children who don't know yet that being alive has nothing to do with one's lifespan being long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/9mgy0v/de_immortalis_pt_iv_s/


	5. pt. v: interlude: Pandora's Library

Catch-me-if-you-dare, o cat-in-the-box.

.

Jack jumped over too many wretched candlesticks; skin grafts, feet to face, all for a broken spring and careless hands. Think, think, think.  _Larkspur and anemone._

.

Ideas out and now we are thinking.  _I ask but that of you, my dear-_  Color outside the lines, and ye shall receive. You shall find messy handwriting scribble-stamp labels, labeled, and address, addressed to your fallen grace, saving face for careless hands.

.

Getting hit by a double-decker bus driven by a drunk man with four corpses in his house and a sick daughter in Ward 16 and a cup of something caffeinated that spilled onto his lap by a hole-in-the-wall dive bar by the 1 train stop on 125th Street isn't that bad. Seriously.

.

I restart for clarity, though it's difficult to find these days. Getting hit by a double-decker bus is not as painful as it sounds.

.

The list contains flowers, sketches in the margins: henbane, belladonna, hellebore.  _Blue hydrangeas green carnations roses yellow red and white-_

.

_I can't stop asking myself why/ you kill me again and get me high-_

"She's still singing. Try again." he said to the student a hundred years ago. I should have known. I should have known long before then.

"Hysterics," he'd said, "From denying her true form. We are beyond anything those humans will ever be capable of."

_If at first you don't succeed-_

.

What were the odds? What were the odds, anyway?  _Infinity minus twenty-one to five, falling fast_ fallen grace, going gray, hair and eyes gone white. Exhaustion.

.

How long has it been? How long since Whitman and Wilde ate the petals of morning glories and gave in to ritual madness? How long since monkshood and wormwood and mugwort and blackberry? How long since lawns came into being and the world grew larger and infinitely  _more_?

.

_We're not even there yet, my dear._

.

"How is she even still breathing?" Nurses abound. I like this new time. Chokeberries, bloodroot.

.

Titanic: probability, gods versus chance. A new changeling sank on a ship a hundred years ago and I wish I'd known her before the man of grey fog sank his teeth into her soul and it's too late.  _We carry the crates of just-returned volumes, our lives to be reshelved._

At the check-out desk there's a container of ripped-up pieces of paper, strewn, outside the lines. Think out of the box and you'll find success, yes? So think.  _Think, think. ThinkthinkthinkthinkTHINK already_

.

Back then, he was not grey. Back then, we matched.

_Behold your myth, o humans._

.

I am older than you. I have been in pantheons you know not, and I've spoken my story before.

"Magdelena, do you not know that you are blessed?" said a sweet young man who died for politics. We are everywhere. We are not special.

.

Thinking takes time, but it works, it works.

.

_Would that I were the shirt upon your back-_

_Would that I were the wine upon your tongue-_

_Would that I were the ground beneath your shoes, my dear._

.

Thinking is fine. Thinking takes time, but it works. It works, until the ideas run out and you're left with writing what you know: messy thoughts. Stumbling legs. Shaking careless hands, and then-

.

The crate of books is dropped down the stairs we all fall down, and now they have to clean up the mess and rearrange it all. Exhaustion.

.

"Yeah, claims she's immortal or something. Homeless, probably a runaway. She also said she works in a library, but chances are the ID we found was stolen."

I am everywhere I am everything and I was once the first of our kind. _Amen, motherfucker_. The world's worst could never be carried by one person.

.

The box is empty now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/afzeqd/de_immortalis_pt_v_pandoras_library/


End file.
